


The Care And Feeding of Domesticated Rogues And Free-Range Jedi

by Varghona



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Fluff, Food Network - Freeform, Headcanon, M/M, Post-RotJ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-14 03:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9158062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varghona/pseuds/Varghona
Summary: The war is over.  Wedge and Luke get an apartment and a dog.





	1. Decorating

Wedge likes the practical industrial design. Luke likes the open floor plan and natural light. They both love the view from the bedroom.

The 'fresher is what seals the deal. It's ridiculously luxurious by their standards, and after years of living in crowded and/or primitive conditions on the run, they decide to indulge. It has a skylight, _two_ sinks, and the shower features both sonic and water options. Wedge would have liked a tub, but he knows Luke is uncomfortable with what he sees as "wasting" water, so he doesn't push the issue. Luke is okay with the double shower heads though, because showering together means saving water.

"I never heard it called 'saving water' before," Wedge says.

Luke is eager to start decorating and making the place their own; Wedge readily admits he has little interest in this sort of thing (to him "making the place your own" means having sex in every room their first night there), so he tells Luke to have at it. 

"I thought you wanted to be an architect," Luke taunts him good-naturedly. And a bit breathlessly.

"Architects design buildings, not--decorate them."

Luke wraps his arms around Wedge, chest pressed to Wedge's back. Skin to skin. "You decorate this place by being here."

Wedge thinks maybe they've spent more time in the shower than is wise, if saving water is their goal. But he decides not to mention it.

 

Wedge comes home from work at Starfighter Command to find drop cloths on the floor, Luke cleaning his hands with solvent, and the smell of fresh paint. The entrance wall is now a vivid shade of turquoise.

"You're not doing the whole place like that?" slips out before Wedge can stop it. He doesn't mean to sound critical, but he's starting to reconsider the wisdom of giving Luke Skywalker paintbrushes and free rein.

Luke grins and shakes his head. "Accent wall. Go check out the bedroom." He looks ridiculously pleased with himself.

Turns out Luke's been busy. He must have started early, because the paint in there is already dry and the room decorated. The walls are dark soothing charcoal grey. Luke's hung a matching grey curtain in the window, and glimmering fabric printed like a star chart on the wall opposite their new bed. It's a _real_ bed, a proper bed for two people, which is something they've enjoyed maybe twice in all the time they've had together so far. The bedclothes are the same dark grey as the walls and curtain, and Wedge wants to fall right into it. Preferably with Luke on top of him.

Much later, with all the lights out and their breathing slowed and the pounding thunder of their hearts eased to steady beats, Wedge twines his fingers with Luke's.

"It's a little like we're in space," he says. The monochrome room is quiet and dark and soft, lit only by the stars.

Luke presses a kiss to Wedge's chest, where the skin is still warmed by a lingering flush. "That was the idea. We were always good, flying together in space."

 

Bit by bit, they fill their new living quarters. They've both lived on the run for so long, they don't own much more than whatever clothing, gear, and supplies they can fit in a duffel bag. They're hesitant to bring material things into their lives, hesitant to fill their space with _stuff_. Wedge's main contributions to the decor are plants. He buys the first one as a gift, on a whim: a little desert succulent in a small glazed brown pot. The smile it brings to Luke's face incites Wedge go out and buy more, until they have a formidable collection of terraria. He discovers that Luke likes flowers, too. After that, there are always fresh flowers on the dining table. He even puts green plants in the 'fresher--dark leafy foliage in three rectangular brass pots, along the wall of the spacious shower. 

Luke has a marked preference for used items, and he hunts thrift shops and junk yards, looking for cast-offs that just need a little love. It continues to dismay and disappoint him, how quick people are to throw perfectly good things away just because the shine got rubbed off. His prize junk yard find is a pair of wooden air propellors, of the kind often developed by cultures in the early stages of aviation. They're replicas, but good ones. (The real things are either in museums or on planets yet undiscovered. Or in the private collections of gangsters who might have discovered said planets before anyone else.) Luke cleans them up, polishes them, and hangs them on the wall next to the breakfast nook.

He has a preference for natural things, too--carved stone trivets, woven grass baskets and mats, real wood stools and end tables. There was plenty of stone on Tatooine, but never grass or wood.

He likes color. Tatooine had a way of bleaching and blasting any kind of color into dullness and, eventually, a uniform sand tone. So now colors catch his eye the way shiny things attract corvids, and he brings them home: a pair of molded jade green chairs; candy red seat cushions, just like on the benches at Didi's Diner on Coruscant (although much much cleaner); a cornflower blue teapot; salvaged stained glass in every color. All of it clashes and none of it should work together, but it does.

Wedge continues to be bewildered by what Luke does with the front entrance. Inexplicably, Luke gathers a variety of cast-off junk and uses it to spell out the word WELCOME in mismatched but absurdly cheerful letters on the turquoise accent wall. (Wedge's brain is still trying to wrap itself around the "accent wall" thing. Walls are support structures. Room dividers. They don't have to be pretty.)

"We don't get a lot of guests," Wedge says diplomatically. "Who are we welcoming?"

Luke just smiles. "Trust me. It's important." Wedge shrugs internally and decides he can live with it. If Luke likes it, that's what matters.

Six months into their living arrangement, Luke sets out on a Jedi thing. Just following leads, following where his research takes him. But it means he's gone for a few months. Wedge stays behind, as his duty requires.

Luke's WELCOME is the first thing that he sees, every night when he comes home. He realizes it was never intended for guests.


	2. Dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a cold, drippy, drizzly grey day when Luke brings home a puppy. Because of course he would.

Whenever he gets home late, Luke's first words are usually, "Hey Wedge, I'm home."

Tonight he says, "Hey Wedge! Come look what I found!"

Luke is soaked, and his wet, muddied robes make him look like he's been rolling around on the ground. Wedge would normally worry about what he might've gotten into, but the pure happiness in Luke's voice, the boyish smile and the way his eyes shine, indicate that whatever Luke found, it's good news. He carries something in his arms, bundled up against his chest and hidden within his robes.

Then the something sticks its head out: a wet nose, followed by a round, heavy-jawed head and floppy ears. Big blue eyes, wrinkled forehead. The puppy whimpers.

"Oh," Wedge says, stopping short of his usual hug-and-kiss greeting. Wet Jedi are no problem. Wet dog noses are another matter.

Wedge has nothing against animals. But he's never been one to form emotional attachments to them, either. He likes order and routine; specifically, he likes the order and routine of his current life, and Luke has just brought a metaphorical grenade into it. 

A four-legged, tail-wagging, slobbering, chewing, shitting, cute grenade.

"I found her crying in a storm drain," Luke says. "She would've been drowned, or buried in mud, if she'd stayed there another half hour."

Luke unwraps the puppy from his voluminous robes and sets her down. She looks very young, but her paws are enormous and she's unsteady on them, wobbling as she snuffles around. Underneath the mud, she's the color of dull nickel, with a white stripe down her face and a white bib. 

She promptly piddles on the floor. Wedge seriously considers telling Luke an emphatic, absolute "no" for the first time in their relationship.

"Luke, if I wanted a juvenile whirlwind of destruction in our home, I'd ask Janson to come over." 

"Wedge, she's helpless, she's all alone--"

"Puppies are a lot of work, a lot of training, and look at her paws--she's going to be big. She'll be trouble if she's not trained up right, and neither of us has the time. I'm sorry, but she has to go."

"C'mon, Wedge. We can't save her just to hand her over to animal control. You know what they'll do."

Wedge knows. He also knows when he's being manipulated, and he never appreciates it.

Word around Starfighter Command--in fact, throughout the entire New Republic military and civilians who pay attention to this sort of thing--is that Wedge Antilles has cold-space lubricant instead of blood. Luke knows the reality is....

Well actually, yeah, Wedge _can_ be a pretty cold bastard. 

But only when it comes to dealing with enemies, or accomplishing a mission objective. At heart he's just a kind and decent man with a soft spot for--and an almost fanatical need to protect--the lost, the broken, the orphaned. (That's part of what drew him to a certain farmboy who was suddenly on his own in the galaxy, overwhelmed by the burden of carrying the hopes of a Rebellion and the expectations of dead Jedi.) Luke knows very well the hidden gentleness in the hard-eyed fighter pilot who's shared his life and his bed for years, and as Wedge watches the pup stumble and snuffle her way around, Luke can see him starting to thaw.

"You had a dog once...on Tatooine, right?" Wedge finally says, looking over at Luke. 

"Yeah. Seems like another lifetime ago," Luke admits. That had been another stray he'd brought home--a skinny, sand-colored cur he'd found nosing through garbage in Anchorhead. Uncle Owen had finally relented and let him keep it, but discouraged him from naming it. Discouraged him from...getting too attached.

_It'll be useful to guard the place, warn us when Sand People are coming. It's not a pet, Luke._

"I've worked with dogs...a little. Back home, at the farm school. They had herding dogs to help keep the nerfs in line." He studies Luke with those penetrating, dark eyes of his. "You...really want this, don't you."

Luke nods. "It'll be okay. Trust me."

Wedge rubs the back of his neck, sighing. "If she's to stay, I suppose we need to think of a name."

They go back and forth for awhile suggesting names, but nothing sticks. During that time, the puppy samples a wooden chair leg, one of Luke's woven grass mats, and a corner of diner seat cushion; finds a lost sock under the bed and plays keep-away as both Jedi and pilot chase her around the apartment; runs blindly into an end table during said keep-away game, sending one of Wedge's plants crashing to the floor. For a moment Wedge looks like he might revert back to his "to the pound with you" stance, but as the puppy staggers away from the scene of the accident, looking dazed and confused, his expression softens.

He sinks to the floor cross-legged, facing the window as if he can't deal with the chaos visited upon his refuge and he'd rather be out flying under open sky--even in this weather. The puppy crawls into his lap, curls up, and five seconds later she's fast asleep.

Wedge gently strokes her floppy little ears as he stares out the window at the leaden clouds. 

"Dreich," he says finally. "It's a dreich day."

Luke's been around Wedge long enough to know the word. It fits her coloring, and, well, she does produce a lot of precipitation.

"Dreich it is," Luke agrees. He sits down next to Wedge, thigh-touching-thigh, and puts his arm around Wedge's shoulders.

"I'll take care of her, I promise," Luke says. "She won't be any problem to you."

Wedge half-smiles, raising an eyebrow at Luke. "We're in this together. We'll both take care of her, that's the only way to do this right."

"I love you."

"Damn right you do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That throwaway line in the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope, about Luke remembering a dog he'd once owned, always intrigued me. Luke would be a dog person, I think.


	3. Sustenance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke knows how to cook. Wedge knows how to open MREs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was all supposed to be happy fluff fic, maybe a thousand words. Then Wedge went rogue. And Luke sat on the sidelines, cheering him on. So this took a bit longer than expected.

Luke knows how to cook. Wedge knows how to open MREs.

It surprises people to learn that the Hero of Yavin, Avenger of Alderaan, and First Jedi of the New Republic is actually pretty handy in the kitchen. It shouldn't, though. Luke has many practical skills and a good deal of mundane knowledge about running a home--how to clean things, fix things, budget things, and yes, cook things. Some of it he picked up from Yoda, but mostly he learned by osmosis from his Aunt Beru. He can bake bread (real yeast bread, not just Tatooine flatbread), cook eggs every possible way, turn scraps and leftovers into things you'd actually want to eat. 

Wedge's lack of cooking skill, on the other hand, surprises absolutely no one. Orphaned at seventeen, he's spent almost half his life on freighters or in the military--and his early training was not especially domestic even before that. He can boil water for caf, porridge-in-a-packet, or instant noodles, and he can put together a sandwich, but anything more complicated requires dialing for takeout.

Luke doesn't mind. He rather enjoys watching Wedge shuffling around the kitchen in his boxers in the too-early morning, all sleepy eyes and tousled dark hair, as he makes caf and porridge for two while Dreich dogs (ha) his steps. It doesn't matter to Luke that breakfast came from a packet; what matters is that it's Wedge who puts it in front of him, the porridge and caf already sweetened the way Wedge knows Luke likes. Sweeter still is the kiss that Wedge gives him, casual but full of affection, before he turns away to take care of Dreich's breakfast.

Dreich dances in place, her nails making little clicking noises on the floor, as Wedge cracks the seal on a package of dog food. It's organic, with no by-products or preservatives, and supposed to be the very best on the market. Wedge won't settle for anything less for her. It actually looks like tasty stew and Luke reflects, partly amused and partly bemused, that their beloved, spoiled mutt eats better than many people in the galaxy.

He grins as Wedge puts the bowl of dog food on the floor and Dreich digs in, devouring the stuff in noisy, slurping gulps. "You'd think we were starving her," Luke says, "but she eats better than we did during the war." Indeed, in the year-and-four months since Luke brought her home, Dreich's grown into eighty pounds of solid-packed muscle. She's not starving.

"She eats better than we're eating now," Wedge replies, finally sitting down on the bench next to Luke, with his own porridge and caf. "Wish I could do you a better send-off than instant oats."

"It's good. I don't want anything too heavy."

"Not the point." Wedge sips his caf and leans back against the wall, gazing at Luke with those dark eyes of his. The permanent worry-pucker between his brows seems a little deeper this morning. "You're going away again and the most I can do for you is boil water."

This is not strictly true. When Luke goes traveling, whether it's for a day or weeks, Wedge always manages to somehow hide chocolates in his bags, for him to find later. Luke's fond of the little individually-wrapped bell-shaped candies.

"You take care of me just fine," Luke says, because that _is_ the strict truth. They keep each other very well, each in their own way.

But Wedge is reluctant to let it go. "When I come home late, or back from a mission, you've always got real food on the table. And when you make breakfast, you see me off with scrambled eggs that aren't scorched on the bottom."

Luke shrugs and starts in on his porridge. "Nothing fancy though," he points out. "I just like to cook. It's active meditation. Master Yoda discovered it was easier for me to enter a meditative state if my hands were busy." 

"I saw the freezer. How many dinners did you make, anyway?"

"Well, enough to see you through most of the time I'll be gone." Luke doesn't want Wedge to have to eat out--or eat reconstituted stuff--every night.

"That's considerably more than just active meditation. That's just plain work."

"Tell you what--when I get back, I'll teach you."

"We'll be eating a lot of takeout," Wedge predicts darkly.

"Nah, it'll be fun, cooking together."

"Eventually, maybe. It's all the kitchen disasters that'll happen before you get me up to scratch, that has me worried."

"Hey, I thought Hobbie was the resident pessimist in Rogue Squadron." Luke chuckles and reaches up to run his fingers through Wedge's messy hair, smoothing it out. "Save your worries for things that matter."

****

Later, as Luke gets a quick shower and Wedge goes through his ritual of hiding chocolates (in the side pockets of Luke's bag, in the pockets of one of his folded tunics, and inside his right spare boot), he realizes this whole cooking thing does trouble him.

And Wedge Antilles is a man who tends to take immediate action against whatever troubles him.

 _I've got two months,_ he thinks. _That's surely enough time to at least get the basics._

The idea of waiting for Luke to get home and teach him--as if Luke won't have enough teaching to do, soon enough--leaves him with a sour taste in his mouth. Wedge doesn't want to be another kind of student, another burden. Besides, teaching himself to cook will be something to do, something to keep him busy in the lonely evenings to come.

On a sudden whim he goes to his desk, straight to the drawer where he keeps spare sheets of flimsy. He pulls one out and, with quick, neat movements, he scribbles a dozen or so images on the page. He folds it up and returns to Luke's bags, slipping the message inside Luke's left spare boot. 

Just a little something extra for the trip.

****

Wedge puts his plan into action later that day, after he comes home from Starfighter Command and Dreich gets her evening walk. Step one seems obvious: education. He's not big on mindless or passive entertainment, so watching Food HoloNet will be a new thing for him. But it'll be educational, right?

He tunes in, and for a moment just stares in confusion. There's blaring music, a kitchen set that more resembles a tattoo parlor, and a Hutt with sunglasses, bleached spiked hair, and a shirt with flames printed on it. The Hutt speaks rapid-fire, too fast for Wedge to follow and almost too fast for the Basic subtitles underneath, but he manages to pick up that the Hutt is making something called a Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam Appetizer. It's served in a bucket.

Wedge looks down at Dreich, who appears to be watching the show as well.

"You wouldn't eat that, would you?"

Dreich looks up at him with a big doggy grin.

"Then again, maybe you would. I saw what you put in your mouth at the park today, don't think I didn't."

Twenty minutes later, Wedge watches in dumbfounded horror as the next host--an insane drunk woman--desecrates a perfectly good Iego angel food cake by splitting it through the middle, smearing canned frosting over both halves and then smashing them together again, smearing more of said frosting over the top, dumping tinned fruit pie filling in the middle, jamming seven candles in it, and then sprinkling the whole lot with corn nuts.

Half an hour after that, when an insane perky woman calls extra virgin olive oil "Eee Vee Oh Oh, extra virgin olive oil" for the tenth time in fifteen minutes, he's sitting on his hands to keep from ripping the holoprojector out of its socket and hurling it across the room.

"WHY CALL IT EEE VEE OH OH IF YOU'RE GOING TO SAY 'EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL'? I MEAN WHAT IS THE BLOODY POINT OF ACRONYMS IF YOU'RE JUST GOING TO SAY THE WORDS ANYWAY?"

He finally turns it off, though, when the next host (a Twi'lek who looks like she was hired purely to make up for the Hutt's lack of sex appeal) promises to demonstrate a recipe for "healthy ryshcate." 

"I don't want to live in a galaxy where such a thing exists," Wedge says to the silent darkness of the apartment. Dreich whines and puts her chin on his knee, commiserating.

The concept hurts him to his Corellian soul. Ryshcate is love. Ryshcate is life. Ryshcate is celebrations and holidays, family and friends. It's not meant to be something you eat all the time, or in such portions that you'd need a "healthy" version. The very idea completely misses the point of ryshcate in all its dense, sugary, buttery, nutty, booze-soaked glory.

Still, in a way, this has been educational. He's learned that a major entertainment holonetwork pays a _Hutt_ millions of credits to ostensibly _teach people how to cook._ Wedge can't fry eggs without burning them, but even his worst efforts have never approached anything as obscene as the Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam Appetizer.

 _I can do this,_ he thinks.

****

He decides that step two will be to just learn how to use a knife without slicing off his own fingers. The next evening finds Wedge in the kitchen with a chef's knife, a cutting board, and an array of root vegetables. 

He's not a complete novice. He's handy with a knife in terms of survival skills; he can clean and gut a fish, for example, and he knows how to use, and defend against, a vibroblade. But getting a uniform dice on an onion? That's going to take some practice.

Four onions later, his sinuses are in full revolt and he's effectively blinded by tears. At one point he nearly takes out an eye for real, reaching up to scrub tears away with his sleeve and forgetting that he's got a chef's knife in the same hand.

"Should've started with potatoes," he sniffles to Dreich. The dog just cocks her head, looking confused. And slightly worried.

Wedge thinks she might have a point. He's slightly worried too, as he looks over his handiwork. Cutting along the z-axis is tricky, insofar as keeping the knife flat and the cuts even. Cutting the y-axis is easy enough, but it's the x-axis where everything falls apart, literally--the layers of the onions seem to want to slip and slide under his knife, resulting in mutilation rather than a nice clean dice. Maybe the knife's not sharp enough. Maybe potatoes _will_ be easier.

Three minutes later, Wedge is bandaging his hand. Potatoes are prone to rolling, is what they are. 

He doesn't give up, though. After some consideration, he realizes that a very thin slice off one side results in a stable potato that doesn't try to run away when you cut it. And just like that, almost like magic, he dices up a pile of perfect little potato cubes.

Carrots turn out to be a little trickier, but it's the same principle. Stabilize, then slice. Wedge has a good eye for judging size and spatial relationships, and he ends up with small cuts of carrot. It dawns on him that he's half-way to a perfectly servicable side dish, if he were to boil them with peas. 

He's about to bin the vegetables and call it a night when he looks over at the remaining onion.

_Fuck it. Let's have another go._

This time, he cuts the root end off as well as the stem, going against the how-to tutorial he found earlier that day. It just feels right. He slices the onion in half, turns it over broad-side down, and starts chopping. Onetwothreefourfive across the y-axis, from root to stem ends. He pivots the onion and makes onetwothreefourfive more slices across. The onion falls apart into diced pieces, all reasonably the same size.

He pops a bit of carrot in his mouth. It's sweet and crunchy and tastes like victory.

****

The next night , Wedge skips the kitchen practical to do some reading. Luke is due to call tonight; Wedge is anxious to see him, and doesn't want anything like a kitchen fire (unlikely but still a possibility) to distract from it. So instead he reads about Tatooine's native cuisine, killing time and gleaning what useful information he can. Dreich hops up on the sofa with him and stretches out, resting her head on his thigh. He rubs her ears idly while he reads.

Tatooine is normally the sort of Outer Rim planet that many Core Worlders could go their entire lives never hearing about, blissfully unaware of its scorched existence. However, on the strength of Luke Skywalker's fame, Tatooine itself has become an unlikely celebrity. Tours added it to their itineraries, fashion designers made "Tatooine chic" a thing, and the media has sought to satisfy a general interest in the history and culture of Tatooine, including what the locals eat on a planet where not much grows.

Wedge has to read with a jaundiced eye--he's heard stories from Luke, after all, and he's aware that journalists are paid to make things sound more interesting than they are. The native melons of the Jundland Wastes, for example, with their cracked black shells, have become a bit of a sensation in the food world in the past few years--despite the fact that their smell and taste could be politely described as unpleasant and more accurately like (in Luke's own words) "the ass end of a bantha."

The native fruits, fungi, and tubers that grow underground sound much more promising and appetizing. Wedge recalls Luke wistfully speaking about pallie fruit, saying it was the sweetest, juiciest fruit he'd ever tasted. He wonders how hard it would be to get some.

The paragraph about Tatooine flatbread is interesting, too. It turns out that many Human cultures independently developed their own forms of quick bread, from Alderaan's cracker-like flatbread to Corellia's oatcakes to the ubiquitous and ever-versatile flatcake. The slaves and free settlers of Tatooine developed both a biscuit-like bread and a softer, more chewy type of bread called haroun. Wedge recognizes both from the description. Luke's made them before, and they're delicious. The sturdier biscuit stands up to gravy, while the pillowy haroun is good for making wraps or dipping into stew.

But then the holo chimes with an incoming signal, and Wedge shuts down his datapad, hurrying to answer the holo while Dreich snores on the sofa.

When Luke appears on the transmission, he's holding up a scrap of flimsy featuring two (apparently) male stick figures performing an array of sexual acts on and with each other.

"You," Luke says without preamble, "are a terrible man."

Wedge manages to keep a straight face. "I see you found the porn. But did you find the chocolate?"

"Terrible, I say. _Ter-ri-ble._ "

"Does that mean no?"

"Are you kidding, Antilles? The chocolate was the first thing I found. I can _do_ something about chocolate. But you're half a galaxy away, what am I supposed to do about _this?"_

And Luke tilts the holoprojector on his end, giving Wedge a clear view of what's going on below the belt. If he were wearing a belt. Or pants, for that matter.

Wedge grins. 

****

It's not the first time they've had holosex but it turns out to be one of the best, the most intense. Afterwards, still shaking and a little weak, they share the long-distance equivalent of pillow talk, reveling in affection, discussing only pleasant topics. Luke inquires about Dreich, and Wedge makes him laugh with a story about how he took her to the dog park and she got bossed around by an akk dog small enough to fit in her mouth. If Luke is troubled by anything in the Force, he doesn't show it; Wedge has nothing urgent to report, no galactic emergencies that might put Rogue Squadron on alert. They've both learned this is a luxury to enjoy while they have it.

Towards the end of the call, Luke brings the subject around to Wedge's well-being. "And remember, don't eat out all the time," he admonishes gently. "I made an extra large batch of rootleaf stew, so there's plenty in the freezer." It's one of Luke's specialties.

"I was just doing some research before you called, so I haven't eaten yet," Wedge answers, truthfully. "I'll heat up a serving after we get off."

"I've already gotten you off."

They share a chuckle; Wedge feels a little grind of arousal, a little heat pooling in his groin, but nothing that needs attention right now. Instead he leans forward and reaches out to Luke. Luke raises one holographic hand, looking at Wedge with longing. Their fingers ghost together, each insubstantial to the other.

"I love you," Wedge says, which he always says now because he never said it enough during the war.

"I know," Luke replies, his eyes shining. 

The next day at Starfighter Command, Wedge bypasses the canteen to go down street level and walk among the food stands for one of Luke's favorites: nausages in dustcrepes. Wedge doesn't care much for the dish itself--it's too dry for him--but he yearns for the taste of Luke's mouth, and it's there in the spiced meat and bread.

****

A week later Wedge runs into Leia, almost literally, as they both round a corner in one of Starfighter Command's corridors. She seems uncharacteristically distracted and it's Wedge's reflexes that keep them from colliding.

"Oh--sorry Leia. Are you all right?" he asks. Because she looks terrible--blotchy, simultaneously puffy around her nose and sunken around her eyes. She doesn't have an official entourage today, just Threepio.

She squeezes his arm. "Hi Wedge. I'm fine, just a touch of seasonal fever."

Wedge isn't convinced; Leia looks like she should be in bed, which Threepio helpfully confirms. "In fact Her Royal Highness is currently running a temperature of precisely two degrees above normal and is under advisement for bed rest."

Leia gives Threepio a betrayed look. "I have work to do." 

That gets Wedge's attention. "Anything for the Rogues?" he asks sharply. 

Leia shakes her head. "No, or at least--not right now. We need more data. That's what I'm working on."

Wedge's shoulders relax just a bit; he realizes that in just that instant, he'd had an adrenaline jolt and he'd been ready for action. It feels a bit of a strange letdown not to hear yes. He does not admonish Leia to go back to bed, because he knows it would be utterly useless. He and Leia are too much alike; neither one of them is the sort of person who can lie in bed when shit needs to get done.

An idea suddenly presents itself, some small way he can help under the present circumstances. "Tell you what," he says. "Before he left, Luke made some ridiculous amounts of rootleaf stew, too much for me. I bet it'll make you feel better."

Leia's tired face brightens with a real smile. "I bet you'd be right," she says. "How about I send Threepio over tonight to pick it up?"

****

Later, Wedge taps his way through a recipe book, looking for tonight's culinary challenge but not really focused on the task. He's thinking more about Leia, how weary and run-down she looked. It wasn't just her physical condition; there was something in her eyes, a look he's seen in Luke's eyes back during the war and one he's seen in his own mirror as well. It's the look a person gets when they've just watched their hopes crumble and crash. His question about the Rogues hadn't just been in an official capacity; he'd meant, in effect, if there was anything she needed him to shoot down for her, and her "not right now" meant there really wasn't anything that could be done. 

Other than to give comfort, maybe.

Wedge has never been one to look for comfort in food (or drink, drugs, or anything besides attacking the source of the problem head-on...well, maybe he's indulged in comfort sex a time or three) but he can't deny his own yearning memories of ryshcate, or the way chocolate makes Luke smile after a rough day.

He pulls up the chapter index and skips right to "Cookies And Treats."

At first he worries about what he could possibly make for Leia--with Luke away, there's no chocolate in the pantry--but suddenly there it is in front of him: Alderaanian Fig Squares. He remembers Leia telling a story from her childhood...stealing fig cakes from the palace kitchen...and he knows he's seen her with a packet of fig cookies more than once. The ingredient list is short and he's got everything on hand: flour, sugar, butter, eggs, fig jam, nuts...well, wrong kind of nuts, but he's got _vweilu_ so just swap those in. Really, the only hard part looks like it'll be rolling out the pastry dough. 

If it turns out to be a disaster, he might have time to hit the bakery for brownies instead.

****

The next day a message from Leia, marked personal, comes to his datapad. 

_**Thanks for the stew but WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET THOSE FIG SQUARES, you've been holding out on me, Antilles!** _

Wedge grins and bites into a leftover fig square. It's buttery and just sweet enough and goes great with caf.

****

Dewback meat, in its raw state, is an intense reddish-purple. Cooked, it takes on an appearance and flavor similar to dark meat fowl. The trick is that there's only two ways to cook it that won't turn it tough as leather: flash-fry in a screaming hot pan, or low and slow until it falls apart.

Something else Wedge has learned about Tatooine cooking--they pretty much use only those two methods. No one on Tatooine wants to stand for long periods anywhere near a heat source, so whatever you're making, you either cook it fast and get it done, or stuff it in a well-insulated oven for hours and leave it alone until it's ready.

He's also learned that hot peppers are a thing on Tatooine. They grow readily in hydroponic gardens, and they're used for jerked bantha and dewback. The theory behind it is that spicy food makes you sweat more and cools you off. Wedge isn't sure it works that way, but he knows Luke likes things spicy, and not just in bed; he's seen him eat one of the tiny slivers of napalm known as the Tanaabian talon pepper, after Janson dared him to try. Wedge could have told Janson to save his credits, because telling Luke Skywalker to try anything will end with him laying some Jedi wisdom on you about doing, followed by him showing you how it's done.

Tonight Wedge experiments with dewback both ways. It does not begin auspiciously. He gets the heat on the flash-fry too high, the oil catches fire, and he has to dump an entire carton of salt (the nearest extinguisher at hand) over meat, pan, and burner to put it out. No real damage to anything except a half-pound of dewback, but it's a dreadful mess to clean up.

He tries to rinse the dewback enough to make it edible, but after cutting into the meat, he finds it burned on the outside and raw on the inside. Dreich doesn't seem to care, doing the okay-I'm-sitting-but-I'm-dancing-in-place-too thing, staring up at him with longing eyes, while a long string of drool unspools down from her jowls to the floor. She whines.

"Ohhhh...all right," Wedge relents, and he sets down the raw burned meat. It takes Dreich all of fifteen seconds to clean the plate. 

An hour later the kitchen timer chimes, and Wedge takes the jerked dewback from the oven with heavy trepidation. But when he lifts the lid off the pot, the smell that greets him is...not terrible. It's kind of appetizing, in a burn-your-sinuses sort of way. And the meat falls apart in shreds when he pokes it with a fork.

Wedge looks down at Dreich, who's made another reappearance in the kitchen.

"I think maybe the key for me is to put things in a pot and then just leave it alone," he confesses to her.

****

His success with the fig squares leads Wedge to a surprising discovery: he _likes_ baking. The precision of it suits his exacting nature. Cooking makes him feel like he's been handed a bunch of paint tubes and told to produce a masterpiece; baking is more like solving a mathematical equation. Correct measurements of correct ingredients added in the correct order baked at the correct temperature equals pie.

Even so, he's not immune to beginner mistakes.

It's impatience, really, a somewhat unfamiliar impatience that makes Wedge uncomfortable and tense. He has this crazy hope that he can somehow recreate his mother's ryshcate, but that's going to mean practice and guesswork; he wants to share ryshcate with Luke--ryshcate that he made with his own hands, _for_ Luke--upon his return, but he's starting to run out of time. The days go by and ryshcate is not something that comes together overnight.

He's gotten pretty good with pie crust, so he attempts a pie recipe that uses some of the same ingredients that go into ryshcate: whiskey, treacle, _vweilu_ nuts. It also calls for chocolate, which means this would be a good recipe to have in his pocket for future reference, when Luke's back home. He follows the directions to the letter and the unbaked pie looks and smells wonderful. It can surely only get better. Feeling confident, he puts the pie in the oven and sits down with his datapad to get some work done. 

Three hours later, he realizes he forgot to set the oven timer. 

"I finally managed to make something even you won't eat," he tells Dreich as they consider the unfortunate pie, which now resembles a large flat disk of charcoal.

****

He keeps scrupulous notes--recipes, results, what was easy and what was difficult, if he had to make subsitutions or not. Aside from the charcoal pie and burned dewback, Wedge makes himself eat the results of his cooking experiments, even when he's tempted to give it to Dreich. For one thing, he doesn't want leftovers hanging around in the fridge. But he finds it's a good way to gauge his progress, too. His palate is getting better at detecting ingredients and more complex flavors, telling if something is over-or under-seasoned, determining if meat is overcooked, differentiating reconstituted ingredients from fresh. 

He finds other test subjects for his baking efforts, though.

"Good morning, Rogues." Wedge points his stylus at the plate of muffins in the middle of the table, as his pilots file in for their briefing. "Help yourselves and let's get started, we've got a lot to cover today."

When there are no muffins left by the end of the meeting, he knows he did well.

"Killer muffins today, boss," Janson says later. (He devoured three.) "Where'd you get 'em?"

Wedge knows that if Janson ever cottons on to the truth he'll never hear the end of it--mostly riffs on him in the kitchen with a frilly apron, combined with sincere pestering to bring more baked goods, please--so he says the one thing Janson will never believe.

"Made them myself."

"Oh, I get it, keeping your sources secret. All right, be like that."

Wedge hides a smile behind his cup of caf.

****

Here's the problem with recreating any particular ryshcate: poll ten different Corellians, and you'll get ten different recipes, all similar but with variations, some of them significant. Ryshcate unites Corellians and yet it's deeply personal at the same time. 

Wedge is pretty sure his mother put cinnamon in hers. He talks with Mirax and Booster, the two other people who might remember it, and Booster delivers.

"Cinnamon from Vreni Island, as a matter of fact," the old smuggler says. "I used to ship it up to her at Gus Treta station."

Wedge finds three ryshcate recipes that look pretty basic, with only small variations, and he makes single-servings of each, adding cinnamon to the batter and leaving out _vweilu_ nuts for now. These are practice cakes, after all. The results are...both hopeful and frustrating.

Cake number one is gooey. Cake number three is cakey. Not to say they're bad, they taste all right. But they're just not the right texture. Cake number two is the closest to Wedge's scent-and-taste memory of Zena Antilles' ryshcate. He thinks he's got the right amount of cinnamon, but...there's still something missing, some nutty element. 

He makes another cake, this time with the _vweilu_ nuts, hoping that was the missing piece. It's close--very close--but still not right.

Wedge tells himself that he's really not under a deadline. The only person putting this pressure on him to produce a ryshcate in time for Luke's homecoming is himself. 

****

Until Luke brought Dreich into their lives, Wedge's primary methods of stress relief involved flying, fucking, or a hard workout in the gym--preferably punching things. They still rate pretty high on his list, but there's a lot to be said for twice-daily walks with Dreich, especially when he has time to fit in a stop at the dog park. It's good for her, to be able to run off the lead, and it's good for his spirits to see her run, to throw her favorite ball as hard as he can and jog after her when she chases it. (Dreich will go after the ball eagerly, but she thinks retrieving is for chumps.)

There are other regulars at the dog park besides the canine variety, of course, but this evening it's just a young mother and her two little ones, with their shaggy brindled Corellian herd dog. Dreich and the other dog have a great time racing and romping, while the children wear themselves out trying to keep up.

The woman, Auren, moves over towards Wedge with a smile. She's pretty, with wide-set eyes and flawless dark caf skin and a glorious halo of curls, and even with all that it's her smile that's the most charming thing of all. Wedge feels more at ease with her than with some of the other regulars; he tends to be a bit shy around people he doesn't know well, but Auren's warm smile reminds him of Luke's, and he's always spoken easily with her. It helps, too, that she's a Corellian homeworlder like himself.

"They'll sleep well tonight," Auren says by way of greeting.

"The kids too," Wedge replies, which makes her laugh. 

He meant it as a joke, true, but lately he's found himself watching children--all children, not just Auren's--and wondering what his own children would be like, if he and Luke had some. He can't explain why he's curious about it. His logical mind tells him it's just an orphan's desire to create a family of his own, and his Corellian heritage (a cultural background kindly described as "family-oriented" and less-kindly described as "clannish") asserting itself in a weird and inconvenient way. His logical mind also tells him it's a terrible time to have children. Luke will soon train a reborn Jedi Order, and there's still an Imperial remnant out there....

His heart says _Fuck that, I want to bring Luke and our kids here to play with Auren's kids._

There's a squeal of "EWWWWWW!" followed by laughter from both brother and sister--the little girl's wiping her face where Dreich just gave her a wet lick, while her younger brother tries to help, brushing his sleeve against her ear.

Wedge wonders if his sister Syal would have maybe stayed at home, if he'd had the good grace to be born closer to her own age--close enough to be a friend, rather than a little burden running after her. 

****

Wedge breaks off a corner of ryshcate. It's dense, but the crumb is tender. Underneath the aroma of Whyren's Reserve, the cake is redolent with the memory-teasing scents of dark syrup and toasted nuts, cinnamon and browned butter.

He discovered browned butter quite by accident, really. He was trying out a recipe for carrots in browned butter--but before the carrots got to the party, the scent of caramelizing milkfat shifted something in his deep brain and a memory bubbled up. _Mom swirling a little pot over the stove, watching it intently while the kitchen fills with a nutty aroma. "Don't distract me, Veggies. You don't want me to burn the butter for the ryshcate, do you, love? Syal, can you look away from the holodramas and take your little brother out for awhile?"_

There was the missing piece.

All that remains now is to taste the outcome. He hesitates, feeling guilty for not saying the traditional blessing that always accompanies the breaking of ryshcate--and feeling ridiculous for feeling guilty. Who is here to give the response, other than Dreich?

 _Just taste it,_ he tells himself. _One taste will be enough to know._

He breaks his corner in half and gives Dreich the larger piece, leaving one bite for himself. She's part of his family now, damn it, and you share ryshcate with family. The dog gulps down the bit of cake and licks his fingers, before looking up at him hopefully. 

Wedge sighs and puts the one bite of cake in his mouth. 

He closes his eyes as the different flavors slide over his palate and the cake melts on his tongue. It tastes...

_"We share this ryshcate in the same way we share our celebration of life." He was sixteen, his hair still long and tied back in the queue that marked him as a youth. But for the first time, Dad let him make the traditional toast, said he was man enough for it. He could hear the pride in Mom and Dad's voices as they said the traditional response: "To the celebration of life." He could see the love in their eyes as they smiled across the table at him._

It tastes like memory. It tastes like home. 

For just a moment, Mom and Dad are alive again. And the tears in Wedge's eyes have nothing to do with onions.

****

When Luke returns, he's greeted by three things.

One, Dreich is right there at the door, slobbering all over him and yelping with joy and shaking her entire backside because wagging just her tail isn't enough.

"Hey girl! All right, all right, let me put my bags down--" Luke drops his kit and kneels down so he can hug Dreich. She immediately wrenches out of his grasp and gallops three circuits around the apartment because she has too much happy to be contained.

Two, Wedge is there, waiting for him by the WELCOME sign, slightly more composed than Dreich. He looks sort of nervous, actually, but not enough to keep him from pulling Luke up into his arms and kissing him deeply. When they come up for air, Wedge pauses just long enough to say "Missed you so fucking much" before kissing Luke again, like he's been starving all this time and Luke is the only thing that could have nourished him.

"Wow," Luke breathes, when they break apart again. "I was gonna complain about Dreich giving me the more enthusiastic greeting, but now I have to rethink it."

"If you really wanted, I could salivate all over you and yowl and shake my ass," Wedge says, completely deadpan.

"Later," Luke grins, and slides one hand down Wedge's back to squeeze said ass. He's on the verge of saying more, but now that Wedge is letting him breathe again, he notices several distinct aromas in the apartment. He recognizes Whyren's Reserve, but the others.... "What smells so good?"

"Ah...that would be dinner." There it is again, the guilty look.

"Holy...did you order from Twin Suns or something?" Luke asks. The Twin Suns is one of the trendiest restaurants in the city, successfully convincing the wealthy to part with obscene amounts of credits for what's advertised as "a reinvention of Tatooine tradition." It's the first thing that comes to Luke's mind when he smells the heady spices, and it might account for the really anxious look on Wedge's face.

"Not exactly. Go look."

Luke heads into the apartment while Wedge trails behind. What he finds on the table is anything but nouvelle cuisine. There's haroun flatbread and jerked dewback with mushrooms, root vegetables, and smothered bitter greens. There's parfaits of sliced pallie fruit and bantha milk yogurt with fragrant mint. 

At the end of the table, glistening with a sheen that promises _I am moist and buttery,_ is ryshcate.

Wedge stands at Luke's elbow but he's shifting his weight anxiously, like he's ready to bolt from the room.

"The, ah, only thing I didn't make was the yogurt. And the mushrooms, I wasn't able to get Tatooine mushrooms, so I had to make do with what was available--"

"Wait--you _made_ all this?" Luke approaches the table for a closer look. The bread's dotted with little charred spots, but that happens with haroun. The dewback meat looks melt-in-your-mouth tender, and the jerk stew itself smells like something Aunt Beru might have made for a holiday. 

"It smells--" Luke stops himself before he can say _edible_ because that sounds like he's damning with faint praise, when in fact he means it in the best way possible. "It smells amazing," he clarifies. And it's true.

Wedge rubs the back of his neck and shifts his weight again. Luke smiles, trying to put him at ease. "What've you been up to, Wedge? Watching Fieddi the Hutt?"

"Hell no! Well, once. Long enough to have nightmares. But I wanted to...surprise you when you got home."

"So you learned a whole new skill set just to surprise me?"

"I wouldn't call myself skilled," Wedge admits. "I'm _okay_ at some stuff. Not as bad as I was. I can do stews and braises now, things like that. But it's baking that I'm really good at."

Luke sputters a few moments before he gets out, "You go through the trouble of making all this for me-- _learning_ how to cook and bake--" he gestures to the spread before them, "but don't think you're skilled."

"It wasn't trouble," Wedge says. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumping a little. "It was...kind of fun, actually. Thinking about you, thinking about feeding you proper, with something I made by my own hands. Wondering what you'd like...what might make you smile." He keeps going, driven by nerves. "I, ah, made sure it tastes all right, but I don't know if it'll taste like home for you--"

Luke silences him with a hard kiss. When they finally break, Wedge is breathless, and Luke's gaze is intense, his blue eyes bright and penetrating, as if he can imprint his next words into the back of Wedge's skull if he stares hard enough. 

"Stop. Apologizing."

****

Yes, the flatbread's a little burned in places. That just gives it some crunch and extra flavor. Luke and Wedge rip off pieces of the warm soft bread and use it instead of forks, to scoop up tender shreds of meat and vegetables. Dinner is full of laughter, and affectionate touching, and feeding each other bites of bread swirled in peppery sauce. They share ryshcate and Whyren's Reserve, and in the sharing there really is joyful celebration of life, giving Wedge new memories to temper the bittersweet of the past. 

Luke takes him by the hand. They stumble their way to the bedroom--bumping into things as they strip each other down, bumping noses as they trade happy drunk kisses that taste faintly of Tatooine's fiery peppers and Corellia's sweet cake.

Later, they lie spooned together, Luke held in the curve of Wedge's body. Luke detects tension in his beloved's arms and shoulders, a tightness where normally he'd be melting and relaxed against Luke. Luke waits in silence. He's learned to be patient about these things. Wedge will eventually speak up about whatever's on his mind, given time--and as long as Luke doesn't give him the cover of conversation about other things.

Eventually Wedge murmurs a sleepy Corellian endearment and presses a kiss into the dip of Luke's shoulder. "You know, we're doing okay. The whole making a home together thing."

"You thought we wouldn't?"

Wedge is silent for so long that Luke wonders if he's gone to sleep, but then the breath of his quiet answer stirs Luke's hair, caresses the back of his neck. "For years, I thought the closest I'd ever get to having a home is just...having space for that holo of my parents. To put down roots...seemed not just foreign but impossible."

"And now?"

"Have you ever thought about...well. I mean. Maybe we'd be good parents."

"You realize you're saying this to the son of Darth Vader, right?"

Wedge hmphs. "Vader might've been your father, but your parents were Owen and Beru Lars, and they raised a good man."

Luke knows it's hard for Wedge to ask for things he needs sometimes, so he gives a little prompt. "What are you asking? You want to start a family?" 

"I'm just...yes. Yes, I do. We wouldn't even have to...go the recombinant DNA route. There're a lot of war orphans out there." After a few moments he adds softly, "I've made some of them."

Considering that Wedge has more kills marked on his X-Wing than any fighter pilot in the New Republic or Imperial Remnant--kills that include two Death Stars--he's surely right about that.

Luke turns over in Wedge's arms, turning to face the man who's had his back almost since the moment they met, ever since Luke took charge of what was left of Red flight and ordered them into the trench, full-throttle, and Wedge said, _"Right with you, boss."_ No hesitation, no question, complete trust. (Even Biggs had questioned. Biggs, who knew him better than anyone.) Wedge has always been there for him, and they've made room for their differences even as they find congruence in their similarities. 

Luke wants to tell Wedge that he's not the only one who thought things like home and family and children were out of reach. They're men damaged by war, damaged by guilt and trauma; each of them left on his own, left to his own devices, would never make a home. But it's possible now; they've made it possible for each other, _with_ each other, giving the sustenance of unconditional love.

But Luke knows Wedge already knows. So instead, Luke kisses him and says the important thing.

"Yes," he whispers against Wedge's mouth. 

It's a long time before they finally sleep, a long time before they lie still and Dreich can hop up to join them and stretch herself out, knowing she won't be ordered off the bed.

In the morning they wake up late, and have scrambled eggs and homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam Appetizer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJidgg0TfU8) does not actually exist, but Guy Fieri would probably make it if he could get away with spraying Axe on a food product. 
> 
> Google "Sandra Lee Kwanzaa Cake" if you're feeling brave.
> 
> The fig squares Wedge makes for Leia are based on a recipe for fikonrutor, from the lovely book _Fika: the Art of the Swedish Coffee Break_. 
> 
> The forgotten pie incident actually happened, and I have pictures to prove it.
> 
> I can't write a sequel to this story, because it's already been written; just listen to "Dear Theodosia" from the _Hamilton_ soundtrack.

**Author's Note:**

> I saw Rogue One last night. (Yeah, I waited a few weeks.) Oh, all the feels.
> 
> So I had to do something fluffy and painless to recover. This is the result, inspired by this photoset:
> 
> http://jediprompts.tumblr.com/post/143264474915/star-wars-apartment-aesthetic-luke-wedge


End file.
